Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Russians and the high bypass engine in the Cold War

Russians are great in many parts in the aeronautical
industry. They built the largest aircraft in history (which are still in use),
built some of the best fighter jets and technology related to it. But aircraft
engines aren't exactly top notch. While their first inspirations came fromresearch aircraft and captured German tech,
their first successful engine was a reverse engineered clone of the Rolls-Royce
Nene engine. The latter came from a visit of the engineers to the plant in
England and managed to legally procure a copy for research, creating the Klimov
VK-1.

This engine powered aircraft like the Korean War
famous Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 and the ubiquitous bomber Ilyushin Il-28 (NATO reporting
name: Beagle). The Russians went on to make more powerful engines for their
aircraft to properly compete with engines and aircraft from their Cold War
adversary, the United States. But the US was able to develop something that the
Russians took a while to counter, the high bypass turbofan. As stated before,
this engine sucks more air than what goes into the heating chambers in order to
provide a cool jet around the heated air in order to provide more propulsion
without requiring more powerful engines. This allowed the US military to fly
heavier jets while keeping fuel efficiency and great range, like the C-5 Galaxy
with the General Electric TF-39 engine (which was the CF6 family of engines
that powered all the wide-body, multiple aisle, airliners of that time).

Russian engines weren't great with low bypass
engines (the long & thin looking engines) as they did not have the same
performance as those like the TF-39. In fact, the most modern airliner thay had
at the time was the Ilyushin Il-86, which was powered by low bypass engine and
usually required the entire runway to take off due to the poor performance of
these engines. In fact, the Soviet Union tried to make a deal with the United
States and Lockheed to purchase a license to make Soviet L-1011 Tristars
because of its capabilities and engines (which would have made it the life
saver and biggest purchaser of this airline).

Imagine this possibility, one of the strangest and
coolest things that could've happened to aviation in the Cold War.

But the technology in the cockpit and engines was
too great to share to the Soviets. So aircraft engineer Vladimir Lotarev
designed the first high bypass engine for the Soviets, the Lotarev D-36.

It was a small engine, powering medium and small
sized aircraft like the unique looking Ukrainian Antonov An-72 (NATO name:
Coaler, Russian nickname: Cheburashka, a similarly looking large eared animated
character from that region),

Improved version An-74 (Cheburashka/Coaler-A)

the Yakovlev Yak-42 (with the unflattering NATO name: Clobber)

But their advancement to this engineering tech went
exponential when the Ivchenko-Progress design bureau, in Zaporizhia, Ukraine,
designed the Progress D-18T.

This engine was the largest engine, at the time (beaten
by the GEnx, powering the Boeing 787, GE90, powering the 777, and the Engine
Alliance GP7000 or the Rolls-Royce Trent 900, either of them powering the Airbus
A380), powering the largest mass produced aircraft today,Antonov An-124 (NATO
name: Condor)

and the largest aircraft ever, the swansong that is the An-225 Mriya
(Russian for dream/inspiration, NATO name: Cossack).

It would be ten years
before the west surpassed the Russian and Ukrainian designs with the General Electric
GE90 and the others previously mentioned. The Dream/Cossack continues to be the
largest aircraft flying and the Condor is somewhat larger than the largest
airliner, the A380. It is likely that Ukraine pushes manufacturing of the
An-124, assuming things calm down between Ukraine and Russia due to ownership
of designs of that aircraft. One can only Dream, at least we will have the American/Russian collaboration with the GE90 engines (Boeing 777-300ER):